Frances Waldeaux | Page 4

curls, flat nostrils----"
Perry laughed. "The eyes, anyhow, are quite human," he said. "They
challenge the whole world of men. I can't place her!" staring after her,
perplexed. "I really don't believe I ever saw her before. Yet her face
brings up some old story of a tragedy or crime to me."
"Nonsense! The girl is not twenty. Very fetching with all her vulgarity,
though. Steward, send some coffee to my stateroom. Let's go down,
Jem. The fog is too chilly."
Frances Waldeaux did not find the fog chilly. She had been thinking for
thirty years of the day when she should start to Europe--ever since she
could think at all.
This was the day. It was like no other, now that it had come. The fog,
the crowd, the greasy smells of the pier, all familiar enough yesterday,
took on a certain remoteness and mystery. It seemed to her that she was

doing something which nobody had ever done before. She was going to
discover the Old World.
The New was not more tremendous or unreal before the eyes of
Columbus when he, too, stood on the poop of his ship.
Her son was arguing with the deck steward about chairs.
"Now, mother," he said at last, "it's all right. They are under cover so
that the glare will not strain your eyes, and we can keep dry while we
watch the storms."
"How did you know about it all? One would think you had crossed a
dozen times, George."
"Oh, I've studied the whole thing up thoroughly," George said, with a
satisfied little nod. "I've had time enough! Why, when I was in
petticoats you used to tell me you would buy a ship and we would sail
away together. You used to spoil all my school maps with red lines,
drawing our routes."
"Yes. And now we're going!" said Frances to herself.
He sat down beside her and they watched the unending procession of
passengers marching around the deck. George called her attention by a
wink to any picturesque or queer figure that passed. He liked to watch
her quiet brown eyes gleam with fun. Nobody had such a keen sense of
the ridiculous as his mother. Sometimes, at the mere remembrance of
some absurd idea, she would go off into soft silent paroxysms of
laughter until the tears would stream down her cheeks.
George was fond and proud of his childish little mother. He had never
known any body, he thought, so young or so transparent. It was easily
understood. She had married at sixteen, and had been left a widow little
more than a year afterward. "And I," he used to think, "was born with
an old head on my shoulders; so we have grown up together. I suppose
the dear soul never had a thought in her life which she has not told me."

As they sat together a steward brought Mrs. Waldeaux a note, which
she read, blushing and smiling.
"The captain invites us to sit at his table," she said, when the man was
gone.
"Very proper in the captain," said George complacently. "You see,
Madam Waldeaux, even the men who go down in ships have heard of
you and your family!"
"I don't believe the captain ever heard of me," she said, after a grave
consideration," nor of the Waldeaux. It is much more likely that he has
read your article in the Quarterly, George."
"Nonsense!" But he stiffened himself up consciously.
He had sent a paper on some abstruse point of sociology to the
Quarterly last spring, and it had aroused quite a little buzz of criticism.
His mother had regarded it very much as the Duchess of Kent did the
crown when it was set upon her little girl's head. She always had known
that her child was born to reign, but it was satisfactory to see this
visible sign of it.
She whispered now, eagerly leaning over to him. "There was something
about that paper which I never told you. I think I'll tell you now that the
great day has come."
"Well?"
"Why, you know--I never think of you as my son, or a man, or anything
outside of me--not at all. You are just ME, doing the things I should
have done if I had not been a woman. Well,"--she drew her breath
quickly,--"when I was a girl it seemed as if there was something in me
that I must say, so I tried to write poems. No, I never told you before. It
had counted for so much to me I could not talk of it. I always sent them
to the paper anonymously, signed `Sidney.' Oh, it was long--long ago!
I've been dumb, as you might say, for years. But when I read your
article, George--do